fear, for example, that the intellectual benefits of scriptural knowledge are wellnigh entirely overlooked; and that, in the efforts to raise the standard of mind, there is little or no recognition of the mighty principle that the Bible outweighs ten

down the heavens in order to open their graves. Oh! you have only to think what a change would pass on the aspect of our race, if the Bible were suddenly withdrawn, and all remembrance of it swept away, and you arrive at some faint notion of the worth of the volume. Take from thousand Encyclopædias. And we are christendom the Bible, and you have taken the moral chart by which alone its population can be guided. Ignorant of the nature of God, and only guessing at their own immortality, the tens of thousands would be as mariners, tossed on a wide ocean, without a pole-star, and without a compass. The blue lights of the storm-fiend would burn ever in the shrouds; and when the tornado of death rushed across the waters, there would be heard nothing but the shriek of the terrified, and the groan of the despairing. It were to mantle the earth with a more than Egyptian darkness; it were to dry up the fountains of human happiness; it were to take the tides from our waters, and leave them stagnant, and the stars from our heavens, and leave them in sackcloth, and the verdure from our valleys, and leave them in barrenness; it were to make the present all recklessness, and the future all hopelessness, the maniac's revelry and then the fiend's imprisonment, if you could annihilate that precious volume which tells us of God and of Christ, and unveils immortality, and instructs in duty, and woos to glory. Such is the Bible. Prize ye it, and study it more and more. Prize it, as ye are immortal beings-for it guides to the new Jerusalem. Prize it, as ye are intellectual beings-for it "giveth understanding to the simple."

fearful on your account, lest something of this national substitution of human literature for divine should gain footing in your households. We fear lest, in the business of education, you should separate broadly that teaching which has to do with the salvation of the soul from that which has to do with the improvement of the mind. We refer to this point, because we think ourselves bound, by the vows of our calling, to take every opportunity of stating the duties which devolve on you as parents or guardians. There is a sense in which it may be affirmed that souls, those mysterious and imperishable things, are given into the custody of every father of a family. And we are persuaded that if there be one thing on this earth which, more than another, draws the sorrowing regards of the world of spirits, it must be the system of education pursued by the generality of parents. The entering a room gracefully is a vast deal more attended to than the entering into heaven; and you would conclude that the grand thing for which God had sent the child into the world was that it might catch the Italian accent, and be quite at home in every note of the gamut. Christianity, indeed, is not at variance with the elegancies of life: she can use them as her handmaids, and give them a beauty of which, out of her service, they are utterly destitute. We We have now only space for a brief wage no war, therefore, with accomplishword of exhortation, and we ask for it ments, any more than with the solid your closest attention. A minister, if he acquirements of a liberal education. We would be faithful to his calling, must are only anxious to press on you the nemark the signs of the times, and endea- cessity that ye make religion the basis vour so to shape his addresses that they of your system. We admit, in all its may meet, and expose the prominent breadth, the truth of the saying, that errors. Now we think that, in our own knowledge is power. It is power-ay, day, there is a strong disposition to put a fatal power, and a perilous. Neither aside the Bible, and to seek out other the might of armies, nor the scheming agency in accomplishing results which of politicians, avails any thing against God hath appointed it to effect. We this power. The schoolmaster, as we

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have already hinted, is the grand engine their own in the things of eternity, why,

the children have perhaps learned the Church Catechism, and they read a chapter occasionally on a Sunday afternoon. And that ye may avoid the mistake into which, as we think, the temper,of the times is but too likely to lead you, we would have you learn, from the subject which has now been discussed, that, in educating your children for the next life, you best educate them for the present.

for revolutionizing a world. Let knowledge be generally diffused, and the fear of God be kept in the back ground, and you have done the same for a country as if you had laid the gunpowder under its very institution; there needs only the igniting of a match, and the land shall be strewed with the fragments of all that is glorious and venerable. But, nevertheless, we would not have knowledge chained up in the college and monastery, We give it you, as a truth, made known because its arm is endowed with such sinew and nerve. We would not put forth a finger to uphold a system which we believed based on the ignorance of a population. We only desire to see knowledge of God advance as the vanguard of the host of information. We are sure that an intellectual must be a mighty peasantry. But we are equally sure that an intellectual, and a godless, will demonstrate their might, by the ease with which they crush whatever most adorns and elevates a kingdom. And in speaking to you individually of your duties as parents, we would bring into the family circle the principles thus announced as applicable to the national. We want not to set bounds to the amount of knowledge which you strive to impart. But never let this remembrance be swept from your minds, that, to give a child knowledge without endeavouring, at the same time, to add to knowledge godliness, is to do your best to throw the momentum of the giant into the arm of the idiot; to construct a machinery which may help to move a world, and to leave out the spring which would insure its moving it only towards God. We would have you shun, even as you would the tampering with an immortality deposited in your keeping, the imitating what goes on in a thousand of the households of a professedly Chris-fact, that to care for the soul is to cultitian neighbourhood,—the children can pronounce well, and they can step well, and they can play well; the mother proudly exhibits the specimens of proficiency in painting, and the father dwells, with an air of delight, on the progress made in Virgil and Homer-but if you inquire how far these parents are providing for

to us by God, and, at the same time, demonstrable by reason, that, in going through the courses of Bible instruction, there is better mental discipline, whether for a child or an adult, than in any of the cleverly devised methods for opening and strengthening the faculties. We say not that the study of Scripture should exclude other studies, or be substituted for them. Natural philosophy is not to be learned from Scripture, nor general history; and we would not have such matters neglected. But we say that scriptural study should be, at once, the groundwork and companion of every other; and that the mind will advance, with the firmest and most dominant step, into the various departments of knowledge, when familiarized with the truths of revelation, and accustomed to walk their unlimited spreadings. If parents had no higher ambition than to make their children intellectual, they would act most shrewdly by acting as though desirous to make their children religious. It is thus we apply our subject to those amongst you who are parents or guardians. But it applies to all. We call upon you all to observe that, in place of being beneath the notice of the intellectual, the Bible is the great nourisher of intellect. We require of you to bear away to your homes, as an undeniable

vate the mind. We will not yield the culture of the understanding to earthly husbandmen. There are heavenly ministers who water it with a choicer dew, and pour on it the beams of a more brilliant sun, and prune its branches with a kinder and more skilful hand. We will not give up reason to stand always as a

priestess at the altars of human philoso- | wanting those who worshipped him as phy. She hath a more majestic temple an idol while he lived; and after his to tread, and more beauteous robes where- death made a pilgrimage to his tomb. in to walk, and incense rarer and more They thought he had sown the seeds of fragrant to burn in golden censers. She a great moral revolution; but even Rousdoes well when exploring boldly God's seau himself lived long enough to mourn visible works. She does better, when over the failure of his own schemes; and she meekly submits to spiritual teaching, in his retirement was he heard to curse and sits, as a child, at the Saviour's feet; the humanity he had so idolized. It is for then shall she experience the truth, striking to remark how, ere he closed his that "the entrance of God's words giveth career, he became sick of a world he had light and understanding." And, there- vainly attempted to reform; and renouncfore, be ye heed ful-the young amongst ing the brotherhood of his species, loudly you more especially-that ye be not proclaimed that the race was incurably ashamed of piety as though it argued a tainted with disease! feeble capacity. Rather be assured, forasmuch as revelation is the great strengthener of reason, that the march of mind which leaves the Bible in the rear, is an advance, like that of our first parents in Paradise, towards knowledge, but, at the same time, towards death.

ROUSSEAU AND LORD BYRON.

BY DR. CHALMERS.

What Rousseau was in prose, Lord Byron was in poetry. Not that he attempted to reform a world, of which he seldom speaks but in the deep derision of a heart which despaired of it;-not on account of its ungodliness; for it is not that which calls forth the bitterness of his adjurations. But he saw that "the whole head was sick, and the whole heart faint;" that the deadly virus had totally pervaded it; and he gave back to the world, from his own breast, a reflected image of the guilt which troubled and deformed it. We should have liked to seen him led to the source of this moral

disease; for though hid under a veil of

THUS far have we explained the doctrine of original sin; a doctrine which affirms that there is an original proneness to sin in all men, in virtue of which it is that all men are sinners. This principle is feebly felt, and therefore feebly recognised by many eloquent expounders; who apparent mysticism, it would seem as would tolerate impiety, if there were force if, in his wild and frenzied career, his enough in their own powerful and pathe-imagination caught a glimpse of that, which he never thoroughly understood. tic appeals, to school away selfishness, and cruelty, and fraud; and who under- "Our life is a false nature; 'tis not in take to tutor the species, apart from what they nauseate as Methodism. We have seen how bitterly they have been disappointed; and how they have poured out this disappointment on their disciples. Rousseau was one of these writers. He may be said to have abjured Christianity; but from the bower of sensibility and romance, he sent forth those appeals, which were to recall a wandering race to primitive innocence. He plied all Europe with the spells of a most passionate and fascinating eloquence; and there were not

The harmony of things; this hard decree, This uneradicable taint of sin,

This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree Whose root is earth; whose leaves and branches be

The skies, which rain their plagues on men like dew;

Disease, death, bondage; all the woes wo

see,

And worse, the woes we see not; which thril

through

Th' immedicable soul, with heart-aches eve

new."

CHILDE HAROLD.

SERMON III.

IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL

BY THE REV. T. CHALMERS, D.D.

“He hath abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.” -2 Tim. i. 10.

reluctance, and the agonies of death of some fixed and unalterable necessity came upon all of them-that each had along with it, and of none more strict, hopes, and plans, and wishes to accom- more unfailing, and more widely extenplish, but that death forced them away, sive in its operation than the law of death. and they are all buried in forgetfulness In the wide circuit of things does there along with them. "All is vanity, saith exist no high authority that can abolish the preacher;" and it is death which this law?-no power that can overthrow stamps this character on the affairs of the death, that can grapple with this mighty world-it throws a mockery upon all that conqueror and break his tyranny to pieces? is human-it frustrates the wisest plans, We never saw that being, but the records and absolutely converts them into noth- of past ages have come down to us, and ingness. All the ecstasies of pleasure, all we there read of the extraordinary visiter the splendours of fame, all the triumphs who lighted on these realms where death of ambition, all the joys of domestic ten- had reigned so long in all the triumphs derness, all that the eye can look upon, or of extended empire. Wonderful enterthe heart aspire after, this, this is their prise! He came to destroy death. Vast affecting termination-death absorbs all, undertaking! He came to depose nature it annihilates all. Our fathers who strut- from this conceived immutability; and a ted their little hour on this very theatre, law which embraced within its wide were as active and noisy as we-the loud grasp all who live and move on the face laugh of festivity was heard in their of the world, he came to overturn; and dwellings; and in the busy occupations he soon gave token of a power commenof their callings, they had their days of surate to the mighty undertaking. That labour and their nights of painful anxiety; nature, to whose operations we are so apt the world carried on it the same face of to ascribe some stubborn and invincible activity as now and where are the men necessity, gave way at his coming; she who kept it up in their successive gene- felt his authority through all her elerations? They are where we shall soon ments, and she obeyed it. Wonderful follow them; they have gone to sleep- period !-when the constancy of nature but it is the sleep of death-their bed is a was broken in upon by him who estacoffin in which they are mouldering-the|blished it—when the Deity vindicated his garment which they have thrown aside is honour, and the miracles of a single age, their body, which served them through committed to authentic history, gave evilife, but is now lying in loose and scat-dence to all futurity that there is a power tered fragments in the little earth that they above nature and beyond it. What more claim. unchanging than the aspect of the starry heavens-and in what quarter of her dominions does nature maintain a more silent and solemn inflexibility, than in the orbs which roll around us? Yet, at the coming of that mighty Saviour, these heavens broke silence-music was heard from their canopy, and it came from a congregation of living voices, which sung the praises of God, and made them fall in articulate language on human ears. After this, who can call nature unalterable? Jesus Christ hath abolished death, he has made perpetual invasion upon nature's constancy, and she never in a single instance resisted the word of his power. "What manner of man is this?" said his disciples, "even the winds and the sea obey him!" Philosophers love to expa

And it does aggravate our hopelessness of escape from death, when we look to the wide extent and universality of its ravages. We see no exception-it scatters its desolations with unsparing regularity among all the sons and daughters of Adam. It perhaps adds to our despair when we see it extending to the lower animals, or behold the lovely forms of the vegetable creation dissolving into nothing. It carries to our observation all the immutability of a general law; we can look for no mitigation of the incorrigible distemper; we cannot reverse the process of nature, nor bid her mighty elements to retire. Is there no power, then, superior to nature, and which can control it? To us a law of the universe carries the idea VOL. I.-6

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